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She didn’t ask what it was. He noted that she wanted to.

He hadn’t moved from the window, but he’d turned to track her without deciding to — the way his attention went where she went now, a fact he intended to examine later, alone, when it was less inconvenient to notice.

“Interesting choice of art.” She nodded at the bare wall opposite the desk, still not looking at him. “Very ‘absence as a statement.’”

“It’s a wall. There’s no art on it.”

“Exactly my point. Bold. Very confident of you.”

She watched him watching her. Didn’t blink. Didn’t look away first, either — noted it, the way she’d noted everything else in the room, and kept moving.

“You always stare like that?”

She’d turned to face him fully, notebook in one hand, unfazed that he hadn’t said a word since she’d walked in.

“Only when something belongs to me.”

It came out before his better judgment got a hand over it. His dragon, talking through his mouth for the second time this week, and no more inclined to apologize for it now than it had been the first time. He didn’t take it back. It was true.

She lifted one eyebrow. “That sounds like a problem.”

“It isn’t.” He crossed the distance between them in four easy steps, testing a fence the way a much bigger animal tests a fence it already knows it can clear. “Not for me.”

She didn’t step back.

He stopped close enough to see exactly what color her eyes went when she was deciding whether to be furious or amused — close to both, undecided, daring him to make the choice for her. Close enough to catch hot metal on her skin and a green note underneath it, glass and turpentine and soap. Ordinary things. They had no right being this interesting to a man who’d spent eight centuries mostly indifferent to how other people smelled.

Six inches, and this stopped being a professional conversation. They both did the math. Neither of them moved to test it.

His hand rose an inch off his side before he stopped it — a motion small enough she might not have caught it. She caught it. Her eyes flicked down to his hand and back to his face, noting that too, tucking it away next to everything else.

She tilted her chin up instead, meeting the height difference he’d expected to do some of the work for him, and refused to let it.

Most people gave ground without deciding to. An old instinct, older than manners. She didn’t have it. She held her position, level and unimpressed, informing him without a single word that none of this was landing. Not today. Not ever.

His interest sharpened considerably. So, inconveniently, did everything else.

“Norden Sharpe.” He didn’t offer his hand. He wasn’t entirely certain, at this range, that touching her ended anywhere professional, and he’d rather find that out in private than in front of a window with half the city as witness.

“I know who you are. Your name’s on the contract.” Her gaze cut past him — desk, shelf, the single visitor’s chair that had clearly never been sat in. “Nice office. Has the personality of a hostage negotiation.”

“It’s efficient.”

“It’s empty.” No malice in it. A diagnosis, delivered without inflection. She nodded at the chair. “Nobody’s ever sat in that.”

“Nobody has.”

“You could fix that.” She said it like an offer and a threat at once. “I know somebody.”

“I’m aware.” The corner of his mouth moved — not quite a smile, closer to a warning neither of them was ready to name out loud. “I’ve hired her.”

Her eyebrows went up, the first real crack of surprise she’d let him see. “You looked at my portfolio.”

“I read the file.”

“Most people who hire me never see the work firsthand. Gerri handles that end.”

“I’m not most people.”